Theoretical

How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The concepts here are the deep story (a chosen people, a promised land, enemies within, and a loss that must be avenged), the ethnic democracy (a state that holds elections and also holds a permanent ranking of who the state is for), the boundary (religion functioning not as belief but as the line that decides who is foreign), and the invented origin (each of these movements tells a story about why it began, and in at least one case the story is documentably false).

Anchor questions

• Whitehead and Perry find Christian nationalism predicts your politics better than going to church does. What is it, then?
• The religious right says it mobilized over abortion. The record says segregated schools. Why does a movement need a founding myth, and who is it for?
• Corporate money paid clergy to preach that free enterprise was Christian. Is that religion serving capital, or capital serving religion?
• Christian Zionists want Israel for an ending in which Jews convert or die, and Israeli ministries recruited them anyway. What does each side think it is doing?
• Al-Afghani was answering European power in 1883. Why does an anti-imperial argument arrive in religious form?
• Al-Azm says some Arab intellectuals essentialize the East right back and call it resistance. Is he right?
• Teltumbde says caste is material, not religious. If he is right, what happens to this theme’s thesis?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens is where the theme’s scholarship lives, and it is mostly paywalled, which is stated rather than worked around.

Christian nationalism: what it is, and where it came from

• Randall Balmer, The Historian’s Pickaxe (2017). Start here. The religious right tells you it was born when Roe outraged the faithful. Balmer, an evangelical historian, goes to the record and finds the mobilizing issue was the IRS stripping tax exemption from segregated Christian schools, Bob Jones University in particular, and that abortion was chosen afterward as a better public cause. A movement’s founding myth, taken apart by one of its own. Free: amc.sas.upenn.edu
• Philip Gorski, White Christian Nationalism: The Deep Story. The structure: a chosen people, a promised land, enemies within, and a loss to be avenged. Free: berkleycenter.georgetown.edu. His book with Perry, The Flag and the Cross, is paywalled: global.oup.com
• Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God (2020). The measurement, and the finding that matters: Christian nationalism predicts your views on immigration and race better than churchgoing does, which means it is not piety. Paywalled: global.oup.com. The numbers are free at prri.org
• Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God (2015). The theme’s link to capital. Business groups in the 1930s and 40s paid clergy to preach that the New Deal was godless and free enterprise was Christian, and “under God” entered the pledge in 1954. Read it against How Capitalism Works. Paywalled: hachettebookgroup.com
• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne (2020), and Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism (2021). An evangelical historian on militant masculinity, and a Black scholar of religion on racism as constitutive rather than incidental. Both paywalled: wwnorton.com, uncpress.org

Christian Zionism, and the argument about what it is

• Robert O. Smith, More Desired than Our Owne Salvation (2013). The roots run to English Protestantism in the 1500s, centuries before Herzl, which is why Balfour thought the way he did. Paywalled: global.oup.com
• Daniel Hummel, Covenant Brothers (2019). The book that complicates this theme’s easiest move. Israeli ministries went looking for evangelicals and helped build the network, so modern Christian Zionism is substantially Zionism’s product rather than its parent. Hummel also thinks the apocalypse reading is overstated. Read it directly against End Times Antisemitism in the historical lens. They disagree, both are serious, and the school does not tell you who wins. Paywalled: danielghummel.com
• Yaakov Ariel, An Unusual Relationship (2013). An Israeli scholar of American religion, careful about the difference between liking Jews, wanting to convert them, and needing them for a plot. Paywalled: nyupress.org

Islamism: the argument, and the arguments against it

• Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, An Islamic Response to Imperialism (Keddie, 1968). The 1883 answer to Renan and the rest. This is the document that fixes Islamism’s starting point: the question that generates it is already being answered in the 1880s, in response to European power. Paywalled: ucpress.edu
• Muhammad Abduh, The Theology of Unity. The other half of the modernist project, and the road not taken. Paywalled: routledge.com
• John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (2010). This theme’s route to Qutb, because there is no legitimate free English Milestones and this school will not link the ones that exist. Calvert on America, the return, and Nasser’s prisons, where the turn actually happened. Paywalled: hurstpublishers.com
• Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt (1985). How it got from the cell to the street. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism (1974). A Jewish communist and Arabist taking apart the premise that Islam explains Muslim economies, which is the unexamined floor under most Western writing about all of this. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Sadik Jalal al-Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse (1981). The Syrian Marxist’s reply to Said: the West essentializes the East, and then some Arab intellectuals essentialize it back and call that resistance. The critique of Islamism from the secular Arab left, free and short. libcom.org
• Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft (2005). An Islamic legal scholar arguing the extremists stole the tradition, on the tradition’s own terms rather than for a Western audience. Paywalled: harpercollins.com

Hindutva, and the comparison done properly

• Christophe Jaffrelot (2024). The leading scholar of Hindutva making this theme’s comparison and drawing the line in the right place: both are ethnic democracies, one de jure and one de facto, and neither derives from the other. If you read one thing on how to compare without collapsing, read this. Free: populismstudies.org
• Anand Teltumbde, The Victimhood of Dalits (2020). The objection to this theme, from the Dalit left. Caste is material before it is religious; Hindutva’s targeting is fascist strategy rather than doctrine; and “religion as supremacy” may be a category error that lets the economics off. Teltumbde was imprisoned under India’s anti-terror law while this school was being written, which is not an argument for him and is worth knowing. Free: india-seminar.com

Buddhist nationalism: the case that tests the whole frame

If the mechanism is in the doctrine, this section is impossible. It is not impossible.

• Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology (2007). The best free scholarly text in this theme, and it is not close. A full 104 page monograph, free from the East-West Center’s own server, breaking the ideology into its working claims and showing each one operating as state policy rather than as private conviction. DeVotta is not arguing this theme’s thesis; he arrives at it anyway. Free: eastwestcenter.org
• Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich, Buddhism Transformed (1988). Where Protestant Buddhism gets its full statement: the thing Dharmapala built was reshaped by the missionaries he was fighting, in their image. The most useful single concept for this case, and there is no legitimate free copy of the book that contains it, which is why DeVotta carries it here instead. Paywalled: press.princeton.edu
• Stanley Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? (1992). How a doctrine of non-violence became a licence for violence, asked in 1992 by a Tamil Sri Lankan anthropologist, whose book was then burned and banned in Sri Lanka. He is saying “religion here is not the belief, it is the border” twenty years before this school existed, and from the wrong side of the border. Paywalled: press.uchicago.edu
• H.L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings (1999). The mechanism by which a nineteenth-century revivalist becomes a twenty-first-century mob, written by a Sinhala anthropologist against his own community’s clergy. Read beside Tambiah: the Tamil and the Sinhalese scholar reach the same place from opposite ends. Paywalled: press.uchicago.edu
• Bartholomeusz and de Silva, eds., Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka (1998). The book that put “Buddhist fundamentalism” into comparative circulation, which is this theme’s move. The only borrowable book in the case, and that was checked rather than assumed. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Gehan Gunatilleke, The Chronic and the Entrenched (2018). Aluthgama and Digana, argued by a Sri Lankan scholar-lawyer as structural and state-enabled rather than as riots that happened. Free, 118 pages: equitas.org
• Dennis McGilvray, Rethinking Muslim Identity in Sri Lanka (2016). One chapter of an in-print OUP collection, self-archived by the author on his own faculty page, which is the legitimate way to read it. Free: colorado.edu
• Nyi Nyi Kyaw, The Return of Ma Ba Tha (2019). Banned in 2017, rebranded, back by 2019. A Burmese scholar on why proscription does not work on a border. Free: iseas.edu.sg
• Matthew Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2016). This lens’s strongest opponent, and it is assigned as such. Walton reconstructs Theravada political thought from Burmese sources and argues it is coherent on its own terms, not a mask that ethno-nationalism wears. If he is right, this theme has been reading the belief as an empty vessel when it is not. Paywalled: cambridge.org

The complication, from inside the targeted community

• Rajan Hoole, Massacres of Muslims and what it means for the Tamils (UTHR(J)). Assign this the moment the room gets comfortable. A Tamil author on Tamil complicity: it opens on the 1948 bills that stripped Hill Country Tamils of the vote, and on the Ceylon Tamil and Muslim MPs who voted for them, and calls it the betrayal of a fellow minority. Free, via Wayback: web.archive.org
• The Broken Palmyra (Hoole, Somasundaram, Sritharan, Thiranagama). Jaffna academics who documented the Sri Lankan state’s atrocities and the LTTE’s with the same unflinching hand, and published it free themselves. Rajani Thiranagama was murdered by the LTTE in 1989 for co-writing it. That is the same standard this theme applies to Ambedkar and to Zarni: refusal from inside, at cost, and here the cost was everything. Free, via Wayback: web.archive.org

A warning that is part of the material. Both links above go to the Internet Archive, because uthr.org, the most important Tamil-authored human rights corpus on this conflict, has been lost to domain squatters and now serves a casino page. The scholarship in this theme is behind paywalls and the primary record is rotting off the internet. If a study circle wants something useful to do, mirroring what is left is it.

A note on method

The founding myths are the lesson. Every movement here tells a story about why it began, and in at least one case the record says otherwise: the religious right did not organize over abortion, it organized over segregated schools and picked abortion later. Once a room has watched one origin story fall over, it will handle the others differently, including the ones it believes.

Give the objection a fair hearing. Al-Azm, Teltumbde, and Walton are in this lens to attack it. Al-Azm says the anti-imperial framing can become its own essentialism. Teltumbde says the religious framing hides the material one. Walton says the belief is not an empty vessel and that reading it as one is how outsiders have always read Buddhism. A room that cannot state their case has not understood the theme, it has just agreed with it.

Use Buddhism as the control. Almost everyone arrives already knowing what they think about at least one of the other four. Nobody arrives with a prior commitment about Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, which is precisely why it is the case where the argument can actually be tested rather than relitigated. If the mechanism only works on the traditions a room already distrusts, it is not a mechanism.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Its weakness is structural: the careful scholarship is almost entirely paywalled while the free tier is essays, surveys, and think tanks with positions, which shapes what a group without library access can actually read. Rashid Rida is missing, the bridge from Abduh to al-Banna, and no verified free English text could be found. There is no Hindutva primary theory here beyond Savarkar in the historical lens, and Golwalkar is deliberately unlinked because every host is a Sangh site. The Buddhist case is the worst hit by enclosure: Tambiah, Seneviratne, Obeyesekere, and Walton are all paywalled, exactly one book in it is borrowable, and DeVotta is carrying almost the entire free tier by himself. Contributions welcome, especially free scholarship and Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist voices arguing this from inside.